President Donald Trump praised Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for “correctly” standing by his deportation efforts Monday, and took a jab at the rest of the high court for not falling into line.
“I’m doing what I was elected to do, remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday night. “My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter — People that came here illegally!”
Trump initially invoked a rarely used 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite his deportation efforts in March. Under the Act, little to no due process, or legal proceedings, would be needed to deport migrants suspected of being in the country illegally.
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Trump’s invocation of the Act was contested by the Supreme Court, who said the White House could only continue deportations in a limited capacity so long as each migrant was afforded the proper due process.
In a Friday emergency application, however, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the Trump administration was going to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants presumably under the Alien Enemies Act.
The Supreme Court subsequently blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to deport the group—who it claimed were gang members—and said it would need time to consider the emergency application on Saturday.
“The Courts are intimidated by the Radical Left who are, ‘playing the Ref,’” Trump said of the decision in his Truth Social post, drawing a schism between justices siding with him and against him.
Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, disagreed with the Supreme Court’s Saturday decision and released a five-page, heated dissent where he criticized the court’s order for being “hastily and prematurely granted” and not “necessary or appropriate.”
“The Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” Alito wrote. “I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.”
Trump praised Alito’s stance, writing that the “Great Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito correctly wants to dissolve the pause on deportations. He is right on this!”
“If we don’t get these criminals out of our Country, we are not going to have a Country any longer. We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump continued. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
All of the justices that Trump nominated during his first term—Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—sided with their liberal colleagues in blocking the deportation Saturday.
Barrett in particular has broken ranks to rule against Trump over the past few weeks, joining her liberal colleagues on numerous decisions, including another deportation vote in early April.
